Flash gets Another Death Sentence, this Time from Amazon

By Jeff Gamet

Aug 20th, 2015 11:57 AM EDT

Flash's coffin is quickly running out of room for nails, but Amazon still managed to find a place for a new one. The online retailer won't accept Flash-based ads starting in September for Amazon.com and the Amazon Advertising Platform.

Amazon joins the list of companies chipping away at Adobe Flash

Amazon told prospective advertisers that the policy was driven by changes to Web browsers that block or limit Flash playback. According to Amazon's advertising guidelines,

Beginning September 1, 2015, Amazon no longer accepts Flash ads on Amazon.com, AAP, and various IAB standard placements across owned and operated domains. This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages. This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance.

Flash has been on a long journey to oblivion for years. Apple stopped bundling Flash with OS X installs long ago and never included it with iOS, Steve Jobs called for the end of Flash in an open letter to Adobe, and more recently Facebook's Chief Security Officer called for Flash's death.

Flash is notorious for security flaws and many companies have either dropped support for the media platform, or are in the process of phasing it out. Google and YouTube, for example, are in the Flash must die club.

Adobe eventually gave up on its efforts to make Flash a big part of mobile Web browsing, and has embraced HTML5 and CSS3 in its own design apps as the future for Web content. Flash once was the big name in online multimedia content, but those days are gone. Now it's just a long, slow death as more sites abandon Flash support, and Amazon is the latest name to show up on that list.

At this point, if you're an advertiser insisting on producing Flash-based promotions or ads, you're wasting your money. Almost no one is going to see them.